Friday Five — January 6, 2017

The Friday Five is a weekly Red Hat® blog post with 5 of the week's top news items and ideas from or about Red Hat and the technology industry. Consider it your weekly digest of things that caught our eye.

Red Hat has announced the availability of Red Hat CloudForms 4.2, the latest version of its award-winning open hybrid cloud management solution. Red Hat CloudForms 4.2 delivers improvements to public cloud, private cloud and container-based platforms, by enhancing metrics and events for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform and enabling customers to run CloudForms in Amazon Web Services. This new release also upgrades capabilities for OpenStack, improving tenant management and introducing storage management for the OpenStack object and block storage services. Finally, CloudForms 4.2 enhances its chargeback capabilities for containers running on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. CloudForms has enabled Red Hat customers from global telecommunications providers and manufacturing organizations to leading research institutions and universities to better optimize costs and time by making their IT organizations more efficient and their IT processes more responsive.

CHECK IT OUT:

ServerWatch - Red Hat Wins Big with OpenShift in 3Q17

Red Hat reported its third quarter fiscal 2017 revenue on December 21, showing growing strength in the company's OpenShift product line. While Red Hat's core Linux platform business is the foundation of the company's portfolio, cloud technologies are now helping to lead the way forward. "We continue to see momentum with customers and community around our cloud-enabling technologies, including OpenStack, OpenShift, CloudForms and related offerings that our customers are using to build hybrid clouds," Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, said. "Within our top 30 deals, seven included Red Hat OpenStack platform, five included OpenShift and five included storage. Of note, we closed our second OpenShift deal over $10 million and another OpenShift deal over $5 million. Significantly, we actually had over 50 OpenShift deals alone that were six or seven figures, so really strong traction."

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Channelnomics - CIAs: Partner Program of the Year - Red Hat

As the channel grows ever-more complex, so the options presented to partners in terms of vendors and partner programs grow in number and diversity. And in the channel, there are those partner programs that are simple to navigate and offer every partner the ease of doing business the channel craves. When judging the Partner Program of the Year award, Channelnomics' judging panel was looking for a program that falls strictly into this category, and with plenty more on offer to make partners' lives as simple and as profitable as possible. Enter Red Hat's Certified Cloud and Service Provider program (CCSP). "Red Hat strives to differentiate CCSP by supporting each partner in ways that will help them achieve success," the vendor says. "Red Hat ensures that all partners receive detailed sales and technical training on Red Hat solutions, so partners can explain to their customers how these solutions integrate with other products and answer any questions that may arise. Red Hat also offers 24x7 premium support to CCSP partners, as well as flexible support models that partners can offer to their customers."

The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, a world leader in genome research, has standardized its cloud computing systems and services on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat CloudForms. This has enabled the Institute to offer and more effectively manage scientific computing at scale, or "Science-as-a-Service," to their own researchers and to biosciences start-ups. With this new offering, the Sanger Institute wanted to simplify collaboration globally and on the Wellcome Genome Campus, but it needed to enhance its computing infrastructure to do so. The Sanger Institute wanted to base the offering on open standards and open source technologies, including OpenStack as a private and hybrid cloud infrastructure. Red Hat Consulting worked in close collaboration with the scientific computing experts within the Sanger Institute to help implement its new OpenStack-based solution in time for the opening of its new facility.

IN THE NEWS:

TechRepublic - Why Red Hat makes more money on Docker than Docker does

Docker is sticking close to Red Hat's playbook, open sourcing its code. Not content to stop there, however, Docker has also been buying companies and open sourcing their code, too–just as Red Hat has done. But arguably, Docker's larger need right now is cash, not code. This is where it diverges from the Red Hat playbook. I'm not suggesting the company is going out of business anytime soon. Rather, I'm suggesting that, to truly follow Red Hat's model, Docker (and other open source companies like it) must figure out how to make open source pay. After all, some of its biggest competitors, like Red Hat, have already cracked the revenue code for the containers Docker popularized. In OpenShift, Red Hat doesn't have a "more efficient model," per se. Docker Inc. offers Docker Datacenter, and is closest to the underlying Docker container technology to know how to manage it. (Red Hat is the #2 contributor to Docker.) However, Red Hat benefits from having built OpenShift on Kubernetes, the Google-spawned community darling for container management, where the real battle for revenue in the container wars will be fought. No one does more than Red Hat to make Kubernetes enterprise-ready. In other words, Red Hat, with $2 billion in annual revenue and a trusted enterprise brand for open source infrastructure, almost certainly has the lead on managing containers at scale.